The Sempster's Tale
“At both front and back of the long chamber running the length of the narrow house on narrow Kerie Lane in London’s heart the windows stood open, letting in the blackbird’s bright singing from the small garden at the rear, while at the front were the talk and hurry of folk coming and going below the streetward window where the house thrust out above its lower floor and overhung the paved lane there. It was a house much like the houses around it, with a shop in its narrow front toward the street ...and its kitchen at the back opening to the garden, with between kitchen and shop a steep wooden stair up to the first floor’s parlor bedchamber, and an even steeper stair from there to the top floor under the bare-raftered slope of the roof, where children would have slept if there had been children, or the servants if there had been more than old Bette, whose arthritics kept her mostly to the kitchen from where, this afternoon, came a most promising smell of baking tansy cakes. Breathing in the spicy smell of them, Anne smiled to herself over her embroidery frame beside the parlor’s garden-ward window but did not pause in carefully setting the slightly twisted yellow silk thread in small, encroaching flat stitches along the outstretched wing of the St.MoreLess
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